Cryptography is used to make it difficult for an unauthorized third party to access and understand private communication between two parties. Private data can be made unintelligible to unauthorized parties through the process of encryption. Encryption uses complex algorithms to convert the original message, or cleartext, to an encoded message, called ciphertext. One version of encryption is known as Internet Protocol Security (IPsec). IPsec provides per-packet authenticity/confidentiality guarantees between peers. A further use of this technology is known as Dynamic Group Virtual Private Network (DGVPN) which provides the ability to enable group-wide Internet Protocol Security (IPsec) security in a network environment. In DGVPN, a Customer Edge (CE) router advertises information to a PE-router indicating that encryption/authentication services are required for a given subnet prefix. This information is then distributed using an External Gateway Protocol (EGP). DGVPN is described in detail in co-pending U.S. patent application Ser. No. 10/649,755, filed Aug. 26, 2003, entitled “Method and Apparatus to Distribute Policy Information”, and co-pending U.S. patent application Ser. No. 10/867,266 filed Jun. 14, 2004 entitled “System and Method for Dynamic Secured Group Communication”, the disclosures of which are incorporated by reference in their entirety.